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Great Sky's high-speed AI chips analyze fusion plasmas. The Associated Press Oct 19, 2026, 6:00 AM Great Sky's SOEN (superconducting optoelectronic network) wafer BOULDER, Colo.-(BUSINESS WIRE)-Oct 19, 2026- Great Sky, Brookhaven National Lab, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, and the DIII-D National Fusion Facility partnered to develop a new kind of AI chip with the speed necessary to sense and respond to searing plasmas present in fusion reactors. The chips differ from conventional silicon chips - such as CPUs and GPUs - in fundamental ways. Instead of processing digital information using silicon transistors, Great Sky's chips implement analog neural networks using superconducting circuitry with optical communication. Great Sky's SOEN (superconducting optoelectronic network) wafer The team designed and fabricated their latest superconducting neural-network chip and demonstrated the chip performing three tasks of relevance to fusion control. The tasks were selected due to their relevance to the operation of tokamaks - large reactors designed for producing fusion power. Two of the tasks injected data collected at the DIII-D tokamak into the chip for anomaly classification and disruption prediction. The data was collected with a very high sample rate of a million samples per second, and the team showed the chip had no problem keeping up with that speed. The third task processed simulated data generated by TORAX - a tokamak simulator developed by the Google DeepMind Fusion team. For this task, the chip was able to process simulated signals to predict sawtooth instabilities, an event that is critical to tokamak operation. This example illustrates the feasibility of using Great Sky's chips as part of the real-time simulation of plasma state that is central to tokamak control and stabilization during operation. "It's incredible to see the team processing data from our tokamak," said Richard Buttery, Director of DIII-D. "The folks here at DIII-D are very excited to see how this chip can impact diagnostics and control for the fusion industry." Superconducting neural networks sit at the intersection of several DOE priorities: advanced AI, quantum technologies, and transformative energy. This collaboration shows how expertise in scientific AI and advanced computing can help move promising hardware concepts toward real-time control challenges in fusion and other complex systems. Fusion reactors demand control systems that can think at the speed of a rapidly evolving plasma. This demonstration showed a chip taking data straight from a tokamak at a million samples per second without missing a beat. It is a meaningful step toward the real-time control systems that practical fusion power will require. The Great Sky team has been developing this technology for over a decade, first at the National Institute of Standards and Technology before spinning out to form Great Sky. Their approach to AI hardware brings significant advantages in speed and energy efficiency, directly addressing the problems that hinder the economic foundations of the AI and data-center industries. This demonstration represents a significant step forward for the field of superconducting neural networks. "This is our largest chip to date, and it's great to see it processing high-speed data directly measured from a tokamak," said Jeff Shainline, founder and CEO of Great Sky. "But this is just the beginning. This approach to AI hardware has so much to offer with regard to fusion, as well as other applications at the forefront of technology. Control and error correction of quantum systems, advanced cybersecurity, video intelligence with continual learning - these are all incredible opportunities as we scale up our systems." The team will demonstrate their next-generation chip with a 10x larger neural network in December. About Great Sky Great Sky is building AI hardware, originally developed within the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, to enable intelligence at the boundaries of physics. The company was founded by a renowned team of PhDs and researchers with decades of experience in photonics, physics, semiconductors, and superconductors. It's backed by marquee investors like Bison Ventures, Olive Tree Capital, Matchstick Ventures, Range Ventures and Access Venture Partners. Alli Lesovoy, Great Sky [email protected] KEYWORD: COLORADO UNITED STATES NORTH AMERICA INDUSTRY KEYWORD: RESEARCH TECHNOLOGY SEMICONDUCTOR SECURITY ALTERNATIVE ENERGY ENERGY NUCLEAR HARDWARE SCIENCE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE PUB: 10/19/2026 05:00 AM/DISC: 10/19/2026 05:00 AM You May Also Like

Great Sky's high-speed AI chips analyze fusion plasmas. BOULDER, Colo., Oct 19 - Great Sky, Brookhaven National Lab, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, and the DIII-D National Fusion Facility partnered to develop a new kind of AI chip with the speed necessary to sense and respond to searing plasmas present in fusion reactors. The chips differ from conventional silicon chips - such as CPUs and GPUs - in fundamental ways. Instead of processing digital information using silicon transistors, Great Sky's chips implement analog neural networks using superconducting circuitry with optical communication. The team designed and fabricated their latest superconducting neural-network chip and demonstrated the chip performing three tasks of relevance to fusion control. The tasks were selected due to their relevance to the operation of tokamaks - large reactors designed for producing fusion power. Two of the tasks injected data collected at the DIII-D tokamak into the chip for anomaly classification and disruption prediction. The data was collected with a very high sample rate of a million samples per second, and the team showed the chip had no problem keeping up with that speed. The third task processed simulated data generated by TORAX - a tokamak simulator developed by the Google DeepMind Fusion team. For this task, the chip was able to process simulated signals to predict sawtooth instabilities, an event that is critical to tokamak operation. This example illustrates the feasibility of using Great Sky's chips as part of the real-time simulation of plasma state that is central to tokamak control and stabilization during operation. "It's incredible to see the team processing data from our tokamak," said Richard Buttery, Director of DIII-D. "The folks here at DIII-D are very excited to see how this chip can impact diagnostics and control for the fusion industry." Superconducting neural networks sit at the intersection of several DOE priorities: advanced AI, quantum technologies, and transformative energy. This collaboration shows how expertise in scientific AI and advanced computing can help move promising hardware concepts toward real-time control challenges in fusion and other complex systems. Fusion reactors demand control systems that can think at the speed of a rapidly evolving plasma. This demonstration showed a chip taking data straight from a tokamak at a million samples per second without missing a beat. It is a meaningful step toward the real-time control systems that practical fusion power will require. The Great Sky team has been developing this technology for over a decade, first at the National Institute of Standards and Technology before spinning out to form Great Sky. Their approach to AI hardware brings significant advantages in speed and energy efficiency, directly addressing the problems that hinder the economic foundations of the AI and data-center industries. This demonstration represents a significant step forward for the field of superconducting neural networks. "This is our largest chip to date, and it's great to see it processing high-speed data directly measured from a tokamak," said Jeff Shainline, founder and CEO of Great Sky. "But this is just the beginning. This approach to AI hardware has so much to offer with regard to fusion, as well as other applications at the forefront of technology. Control and error correction of quantum systems, advanced cybersecurity, video intelligence with continual learning - these are all incredible opportunities as we scale up our systems." The team will demonstrate their next-generation chip with a 10x larger neural network in December.

News from BNL: RHIC team receives prestigious DOE Secretary Achievement Award. A group of 11 physicists representing the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) Discovery and Innovation team at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory has received a Secretary of Energy Achievement Award for their contributions to RHIC, a flagship DOE Office of Science user facility for nuclear physics research that operated at Brookhaven Lab from 2000 to earlier this year. RHIC is best known for discovering that the matter created in its most energetic collisions of gold ions is a nearly perfect liquid - a surprising discovery about the conditions that permeated the very early universe nearly 14 billion years ago. enlarge An aerial view of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a 2.4-mile-circumference dual-ring nuclear physics particle collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory. RHIC collides many types of ions - from polarized protons to the nuclei of gold and uranium atoms - to explore fundamental questions about their underlying structure and the properties of the building blocks of matter. (Brookhaven National Laboratory) The award recipients include accelerator physicists and engineers who designed and built the collider and developed innovative technologies that drastically improved its performance over more than 25 years of successful operations, along with experimental nuclear physicists who led the construction and operation of the particle detectors and the large international collaborations that carried out RHIC's scientific program. They represent a community of more than 3,500 scientists, engineers, and others who have been part of the RHIC program from its inception in the early 1980s through the final collisions this February. The RHIC team was one of 49 teams and 11 individuals recognized at the Secretary's Honor Awards ceremony at DOE headquarters in Washington, D.C. on Monday, September 28, 2026. The achievement award given to teams is among the highest honors given to DOE employees and contractors whose service has gone above and beyond with contributions having lasting impacts on both the Department and the Nation. To receive the award, a group must demonstrate excellent cooperation and teamwork. "Along with the entire DOE leadership team, I am so proud of the accomplishments of our award recipients. Their commitment to DOE's mission is an inspiration," said Secretary of Energy Chris Wright. The RHIC team's award citation specifically lists some of RHIC's impactful discoveries and scientific explorations - and the wide-ranging capabilities that made this science possible. These include: * The discovery and detailed characterization of the strongly coupled quark-gluon plasma, a form of nuclear matter made of quarks and gluons that existed just after the Big Bang and evolved into the protons and neutrons that make up 99% of visible matter in the universe today. * The sustained campaign over two and a half decades to explore quantum chromodynamics (QCD) - the theory that describes the interactions of quarks and gluons through the strong nuclear force - under extreme conditions of temperature and density. * Pioneering precision measurements of the proton's spin structure that revealed the gluon and antiquark contributions to spin. * RHIC's unique characteristics as the world's first heavy-ion collider, the only spin-polarized proton collider, and the most flexible collider ever built. * A series of groundbreaking accelerator innovations that were required for and inspired by RHIC's scientific mission: the ability to collide 49 different ion-beam species and energy combinations; the world's highest-energy polarized proton beams; stochastic cooling of bunched beams; high-intensity and high-brightness hadron sources; and the first demonstration of electron cooling based on radio-frequency acceleration. The citation concludes by recognizing how, collectively, RHIC's scientific program and technological innovations have advanced the frontiers of nuclear physics and accelerator science. "This recognition for the RHIC program and the people who made it possible comes at such an important time as we celebrate the successful completion of the RHIC science program," said Brookhaven Lab Director John Hill. "We were honored to have DOE Undersecretary for Science Dario Gil here for the final RHIC collisions on February 6, to officially turn off this incredibly productive scientific facility and to mark the transition of much of its infrastructure into a brand-new research machine, the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC). As we prepare to embark on a new frontier of discovery, it is a pleasure to honor the achievements of the team that delivered such amazing science from RHIC and look forward to what might come from the Electron-Ion Collider!" Brookhaven National Laboratory is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit science.energy.gov.